


In Good Faith

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Mythology, Character Study, F/M, Light Angst, Magical Realism, Non-Graphic Violence, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-20
Updated: 2018-03-20
Packaged: 2019-04-04 21:02:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,722
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14028669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: He roars.She slithers.[ ALTERNATIVELY - Pansy is a questionably reformed siren, Harry is a directionless ex-demigod, and neither of them quite know what they're doing anymore. ]





	In Good Faith

* * *

 

Pansy is born to the sea with blood on her teeth and magic on her tongue.

She doesn't remember much, after that.

 

* * *

 

Eventually, she leaves.

Leaves her enchanted little cove with its sparkling waves and its jagged rocks and its beautiful, perilous secrets—and it isn't even that difficult. She's been there for thousands of years, luring lonely sailors and greedy fishermen and wayward heroes to their untimely deaths.

She's tired of singing. 

 

* * *

 

She picks an immaculately groomed middle-aged couple out of the crowd milling around the steps of the Acropolis. 

Their accents are strange, and they're bickering quietly, with a pointed sort of viciousness that's reminiscent of—not home, of course, but something a lot like it. Equally as lovely as it is terrible. And she combs the salt out of her hair, and she brushes the sand off of her hands, and she stares out at the couple from her hiding spot behind a lightning-warped olive tree. 

And then she snaps her fingers. 

_Please_ , she prays, and she hasn't done that in centuries, in millennia, hasn't wished for or ached for or needed anything in twice as long, but—

_Please, please, please._

 

* * *

"Mom, Dad," Pansy calls out, and even though the words themselves taste  _wrong_ , clunky and foreign, the couple immediately turns towards her, smiles fond and familiar, like late-blooming flowers in search of the sun. " _There_  you are."

 

* * *

 

Minnesota is cold and gray and barren and  _wonderful_.

There's snow, which is a novelty, and hot chocolate, which is a revelation, and cashmere sweater dresses, which rub soft and warm against her newly fragile skin. All of the water is frozen into thick sheets of smooth, blue-white ice that people apparently like to skate around on, and it only takes a few months of scrubbing herself raw with harsh, floral-scented soaps and lotions and perfumes for the silver-green shimmer of her scales to finally,  _finally_ , start to fade. And she can giggle and she can talk and she can  _touch_ , even, and—

No one knows what she is. 

No one guesses that she doesn't belong. 

 

* * *

 

And then she meets Harry Potter.

 

* * *

 

He isn't human.

Pansy isn't entirely sure what he is, but he reeks of magic, spicy and decadent, the heady, tantalizing scent of the old gods coursing through his veins. He takes one long look at her, his forehead creasing in a frown, before the red plastic cup in his hand crinkles, his grip growing tighter and tighter and tighter as his eyes flash a harrowing emerald green and his upper lip curls with disdain and his teeth glint sharp and venomous in the flickering, multi-colored glow of a nearby strand of Christmas lights. 

"Oh, no," Pansy blurts out, and she can  _hear it_ , she thinks hysterically, the change in her own voice, the silky, sumptuous, instinctive note of guile thrumming through her vocal chords. Encroaching. It's a defense mechanism. Biological warfare. "Oh, no, no,  _no._ "

Potter's nostrils flare, and she wonders what she smells like to him. Revolting, probably. Like the brine of the sea and the electricity of the storm clouds and the blood of her enemies. Sacrifices. Victims? 

"With me," Potter snarls, jerking his chin towards the sliding glass door. There's a sprig of mistletoe duct-taped to the white vinyl frame. " _Now_."

\--

It's well below freezing outside. 

But since neither of them are exactly vulnerable to the elements, Potter stomps through the slush and the ice and the melting snow, heading right for the tree line at the edge of the yard, and Pansy trudges after him with nothing more than a sullen pout. 

"I'm not going to hurt anyone," she says, more indignant than she is plaintive. "I've been living here for  _months_."

"Yeah, and how much longer until you get bored?"

"You mean like  _you_  clearly are?"

"That's not—this isn't about me."

"Fine," she snaps. "I  _was_ bored. That's why I  _left_."

Potter shakes his head at her, scoffing, and uses his ring and middle fingers to shove his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. Glasses.  _Glasses._ Like he isn't utterly immune to human frailty. Like he isn't  _literally_   _immortal._

_"_ Who are you,anyway?" Pansy demands, bristling and shrill. "Why do  _you_ get to judge  _me?_ "

 

* * *

 

It's the wrong question.

 

* * *

 

"Oh, my  _god_ ," Daphne Greengrass gasps when they re-enter the house. Her cheeks are flushed pink, and there's a splotchy stain of what smells like vodka on the front of her crushed velvet skirt. "Did you just—what did you—how do you guys even _know_  each other?"

Behind Pansy, Potter goes comically still. "Um."

"We dated," Pansy lies sweetly, biting down on a triumphant smirk when she hears Potter immediately choke on his next breath. "We dated for a _while,_ actually, before I moved here? And we're totally trying to stay friends, you know, we're just working through some of Harry's  _harder_  feelings about the situation."

Potter forces a broad, slightly manic smile and plasters one of his hands to the small of Pansy's back in what she suspects is intended as some kind of disgustingly unfair intimidation tactic. 

"She cheated on me," he says cheerfully. "My feelings are fine."

Pansy jerks her elbow back, digging the point of it into his ribs. "We were on a break," she counters, just as cheerfully. "And he's in denial. His feelings are  _not_  fine. He misses me  _a lot._ "

"Mm, no," Potter argues with an amiable chuckle. "No, see, sweetheart, we talked about this, remember? Words  _mean_  things, you can't just—"

"He's pining, too," Pansy interjects loudly, reigning in the pinching ache of her incisors and the rampant, needy  _itch_ reverberating through the muscles of her throat. "It's pretty sad, honestly, he keeps leaving me these super weepy voicemails at, like,  _four in the morning_ — _"_

_"_ Well, maybe if you stopped pretending to  _accidentally_ text me pictures of yourself in your  _underwear_ —"

Pansy simpers. "That was  _once,_ and you  _asked_  for it."

Potter looks over at Daphne with raised eyebrows and a patently ridiculous, visibly exaggerated wince, before leaning forward to stage-whisper, like Pansy isn't  _right there—_  

"Guess she's still bad at math, then."

 

* * *

 

Pansy spends the rest of the weekend waiting.

Waiting for a sign, a twist, a snarl in this particularly perplexing thread of Fate—she waits for a steaming ivory mug of hot chocolate to be pushed across the marbled counter of a coffee shop, and she waits for the ugly digitized numbers on a gas station pump to trickle upwards as she huddles in the passenger seat of her adoptive father's SUV, and she waits for her phone to buzz or for her doorbell to ring or for her bedroom window to rattle against a relentless onslaught of frozen, haphazardly tossed gravel.

She's good at waiting. 

She's had a lot of practice. 

 

* * *

 

Potter isn't subtle, it turns out.

His presence—boldly combative, even in her periphery, even in the perpetual background of her new life—is sporadic and inescapable. He's trying on ugly brown loafers in the men's department at Nordstrom while Pansy looks at scarves. He's loudly slurping at a strawberry milkshake—with extra whipped cream and three maraschino cherries—in the red vinyl booth across from hers at Johnny Rockets. He's gnawing on a rubbery blue mouth guard at the indoor ice rink while she tries to flirt with the boy behind the skate rental counter.

Potter is everywhere just as often as he's nowhere.

And Pansy's resulting fury—

It's enduring and discouraging and  _scorching_ in all the same ways the mid-summer Mediterranean sun used to be whenever she bothered to swim out from under the shadows.

 

* * *

 

"Stop it," she hisses, flattening her palms against the sticky, wood-veneered surface of the café table he'd situated himself at. There's an untouched turkey panini on a plate next to his elbow. "I know what you're doing, and it isn't going to work."

Potter's posture remains aggravatingly casual as he sprawls out in his seat. He's too big for it. "Oh, yeah? Why's that?"

"Because I'm not  _hiding_  anything."

"Funny, that's exactly what  _I_ would say if  _I_ was hiding something."

She pauses. "Alright. What do you think my super nefarious  _master plan_  is, then?"

"Excuse me?"

"What,  _exactly_ , do you think I'm hoping to accomplish here?"

He sneers. "Is  _murder_  something you  _accomplish_  now?"

"I don't know, is  _stalking?_ "

"I'm protecting people."

She flinches. "You sound paranoid."

"And  _you_  sound guilty."

Pansy grits her teeth and valiantly ignores the brutal, menacing,  _electric_ tingle surging up and out of her lungs. 

She wants to scream. 

She wants to sing. 

"All I ever did was what I was  _taught_ to do. What I was  _created_ to do. How was I supposed to stop if I didn't—" She breaks off and shuts her eyes and digs her too-sharp nails into the cotton-soft edge of his napkin. 

"If you didn't what?" he asks, too slowly.

"I didn't know," she confesses, and she smells the blistering heat of a forge. The bubbling rot of a kelp forest. His silence  _scrapes_ at her eardrums. At her conscience. _"_ I didn't know that I could stop."

Potter furrows his brow at that, his expression rippling with suspicion, and then uncertainty, and then a stubborn sort of resentment.

His eyes narrow.

Her stomach sinks.

And then she's straightening her spine and stepping away from his table and blindly knocking over a wire-rack display of greeting cards and a giant plastic snowman in a patchwork black top hat as she stumbles out of the café.

She doesn't apologize.

 

* * *

 

He's a monster, too.

Pansy  _knows_  that, has been carefully, instinctively calculating her awareness of that fact in the salt-soaked whorls of her hindbrain since the very moment they'd met.

He roars.

She slithers.

 

* * *

 

Surely, though.

Surely the differences between them are greater than that. 

 

* * *

 

Several days go by, and Christmas creeps closer, the frozen winter air thick with the burgeoning scent of pine trees and cinnamon sticks and cherry wood smoke.

Pansy is still angry.

Pansy is still angry and frustrated and guilty and strangely, unpleasantly upset, bereft, her emotions spinning wildly out of control and leaving her dizzy and defiant and desperate, set adrift, like a storm-stung shipwreck molting in the thankless, deceptively sparkling depths of the sea.  _Her_  sea. 

She clenches her jaw.

She strips out of her pink flannel pajamas. 

She collects three unopened canisters of table salt from the kitchen, and she trudges back up the stairs and into her adoptive parents' tastefully decorated master bathroom. She stares at the massive white Jacuzzi tub. At the gleaming copper fixtures. At her own smooth, lightly freckled human skin. 

She snaps her fingers.

 

* * *

 

The ensuing blizzard—it isn't about creating chaos, she tells herself.

It's about  _privacy_.

It's about ensuring that she's left alone.

 

* * *

 

She fills the tub with barely lukewarm water and pours in all three canisters of table salt.

It isn't home.

There isn't any sun and there aren't any waves and there's no sense of peace or purpose or magic, no, not like there was—is—when Potter's around—and she hates that,  _hates_ it, hates that she'd left so much behind because she'd wanted to prove something to herself and all she'd really managed to do was  _fail_ at proving something to  _him._

She cries, then.

Just a little.

Tears slip down her cheeks, acid-hot, disappearing into the bathwater, and when she looks, there's a faint silver-green shimmer on her thigh. She stares for a moment, nostalgic, bitter, and she's never had the patience for self-loathing or self-deprecation or self- _flagellation,_ has never been able to fully work out what the appropriate punishment for someone like her would even be, but—

The doorbell rings.

 

* * *

 

She takes a deep breath. 

Wraps a towel around her body, folding it neatly under her arms. 

Glides out of the bathroom, the bedroom, down the hall and the stairs, a winding, sloppy trail of footprints glistening in her wake.

 

* * *

 

Potter is standing on the porch, wearing threadbare jeans and a gray v-neck t-shirt.

"What?" Pansy demands, lifting her chin. "If you're here to  _berate me_  about the weather, I just needed to—"

"I'm sorry," Potter blurts out, before grimacing. His gaze skitters across her bare skin, practically tangible where it dips between her collarbones, skims the curves of her breasts, lingers on her thighs. The bottom of her towel. She doubts, suddenly, that he's looking at her scales. "I mean—I shouldn't have—you were right. That first...that first night. About me. Being bored."

Pansy blinks, and then hesitates, and then wordlessly motions him inside. 

The door closes behind them with a soft click of the lock.

 

* * *

 

She doesn't know what to say.

There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of stories about her kind—about Harry's kind—that end violently, tragically, with morals she's only recently learned play a not-insignificant role in her perception of humanity. 

Because he belongs on a battlefield; he belongs in the past, with sword-callused palms and blood-stained armor and a growling, thunderstruck army at his back, with a princess to rescue and a hero to protect and a purpose that's clear and noble and  _big_ , bigger than he is, bigger than any of the futures he'd have chosen for himself would've been. 

She doesn't know what to say.

She doesn't know how to fix that.

 

* * *

 

"I mean," she finally replies, tossing her still-wet hair, "I know. That I'm right. That's why I said it."

Harry presses his lips together, nostrils flaring. "Seriously?"

"What?"

"I'm trying to  _apologize."_

"By stating the obvious?"

"No, by acknowledging that, you know, maybe there's a—a  _compromise_  to be found here."

Pansy sniffs. "I told you from the beginning that I wasn't here to  _hurt_  anyone."

"I know."

"You  _chose_  not to believe me."

"I know."

"You  _chose_  to  _har_ _ass_ me, and spy on me, and—and not trust me."

"I know."

"And it doesn't matter if you thought you had a good reason, because you—you didn't. Not really. You knew nothing about me. You just wanted an excuse to—"

"I  _know_ ," he interrupts, raking his fingers through his hair, disrupting a flaky clutch of snow flurries. "I'm—it's just hard. To move on from..." He flaps his hand, eyes hotly, heavily beseeching as he scans her face. "Everything's changed. Everything's different."

Pansy licks her lips, swallowing around the scratchy pulse of magic pooling beneath her vocal chords. 

Silence—

She's used to it being a precursor to a trap. She's used to biding her time, used to  _anticipating,_  used to letting the poisonous planes of her voice slip between the cracks in the ocean breeze. Because silence should crater. Implode. It shouldn't be comfortable. It shouldn't be understanding. 

It shouldn't be something she wants to fill with words that are so much harder to speak than they are to sing.

 

* * *

 

"Yeah," she breathes, eyebrows twitching inward. She plucks at a loose thread on her towel, and then steels her shoulders, taking a decisive step forward. "Yeah, everything's different."

 

* * *

 

When Pansy shows up to bake Christmas cookies with Harry's hand clasped firmly in her own, Daphne Greengrass emits an ear-splitting shriek and starts to jump up and down on the tips of her toes.

"I  _knew_  it!" She glances back at whoever she'd left behind in the kitchen. "Hey! Assholes! You owe me money! I  _told you_  they were still together!"

Harry opens his mouth to protest, looking hilariously indignant, but Pansy just snorts out a laugh, tapping the pad of her thumb against the grooves of his knuckles. His skin is an unseasonably dark, gold-tinged bronze in the rapidly dwindling afternoon light, and his eyes are greener and clearer and sharper than they've ever been. 

"Don't," Pansy whispers, tugging him closer, dragging her lips along the square-cut hinge of his jaw. "Just...let her believe."

 

* * *

 

Pansy kisses Harry, and it's like the lavender blush of a sunrise has melted into the red-orange haze of a sunset, like the briny swirl of high tide has infiltrated the sand-speckled slosh of low tide, like the glow of the moon and the rasp of the clouds and the salty snap of her fingers as she wishes and wants and  _prays—_

She kisses him, and he shivers.

He kisses her, and she burns.

 

* * *

 

It tastes, she realizes later, like a choice.

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
